Salt Liturgy

The tide deposits its ledger on the rocks— barnacle, kelp blade, the curved spine of a bottle worn to frosted quartz. I kneel and read what the water wrote.

Every seventh wave carries a heavier cargo: the sound of a door closing in another country, a name spelled out in foam and retracted, the wood-smoke smell of a season that refuses to end.

My grandmother kept salt in a blue jar. She said it remembered the sea it came from, that each crystal held a small, collapsing room where light still entered from the left.

I have stood at this margin long enough to know the shore is not a boundary but a rehearsal—the water practicing its one gesture of approach and withdrawal, the sand agreeing, again, to be revised.

Tonight the moon lays its white vestment across the shallows. The water accepts it without ceremony, the way we accept the ordinary gift of being returned to ourselves, salt-lipped, sand-grained, still listening.